the heart never lies?

Is it a saying that the heart never lies?

When work stress was on, my heart rate

(average resting) was 74,  When I visited

family, it was 78.  When I got back home

and was on vacation, it was a better 71. 

When I sang with folks at the pub today,

it was 60 bpm.  Maybe my heart is

deceitful and desperately wicked, but

I think it loves music an awful lot.

A Very Good Day

It was around this time last year that I was

sitting in the Homeowner's class before going

back to my roasting hot apartment where I

got to hear the shouting and fighting of

all my neighbors. 

                                             Now, I am sitting

in my quiet home watching snow fall on

the evergreens outside my study window.  

I have turned on my Christmas lights,

and I am writing.   Later, I will be at a pub

singing Christmas carols and seasonal songs. 

For these blessings, I

am truly grateful. 

Amen.

"Mitochondrial Fatigue"

This diagnosis makes me
want to read not Google
or WebMD but A Wind
in the Door by L'Engle
because the mitochondrial
problems there were solved
by singing if I remember
true and I want this all to
be healed by singing too.

on a cold winter's night

.
on a cold winter's night

outside my window
a mourning dove quietly
sings itself to sleep
.

Pub Singing and Merlin's Unrest

A friend invited me to a pub sing, and I was actually free, so I agreed to go.  To prepare, I pulled out my maritime music CD (hooray for random free promos) and gave it a listen.  I headed to the pub after an 11 hour day at work.

This is pub singing, not opera: loud, boisterous, informal, and slightly (increasingly) drunken.  Pitch is not the most important thing.  I'm not sure what is; maybe enthusiasm?  There were sea chanties and hymns and shaped note music.  I knew a couple of the songs and different versions of a couple others, so I couldn't really sing along, per se.  There were some folks who were amazing and a few who were terrible.   All of them were passionate about music.

I kind of wished the director of my a cappella choir and maybe some of the members could go to one of these.  I'm not sure why.  Maybe it's because I enjoy watching inhabitants of the Great White North encounter rhythm and emotion.  It makes them uncomfortable.  (At a concert I went to recently, the only people moving to the beat were a handful of children too young to have the joy of motion stamped out of them by peer pressure.)  I also think that they might have enjoyed themselves and learned something that could transfer to their classical singing.

My friend goes because he's learning harmony from it, he says.  It's definitely a good place to do that because when you don't know the songs, but you want to sing, you have no choice but to make up your own notes.  The repeated choruses tend to make this easier (as does the fast and loose pitch sometimes).

Did I mention the pitch issues?  It wasn't always as bad as I'm making it seem, but when a room made up of several professional singers can't seem to find the key because of the warbling soloist, you know it's not great.

My friend concluded, "I guess I'm not as fussy about pitch as you are."

My sister would get a kick out of that.  My ear for pitch always drove her crazy and made her nervous about singing in front of me.  And she wasn't even the tone deaf sister.

I seem unwilling to cover my reaction to bad pitch, even now.  I just can't enjoy it, no matter how much passion and love for music is involved.  Why is this?  The world may never know.

Perhaps it's related to why I apparently must move to music when I'm surrounded by people who are uncomfortable around people who move to music?  It doesn't feel like contrary orneriness, though.  I wonder.

They had good root beer.  I enjoyed myself.  Will I ever go again?  Maybe.  There's something undeniably compelling about random people loud enough to drown me out singing whatever the spirit moves them to sing . . .

Revenge of the virus

I was trying to drown and bore to death whatever virus I picked up, and my plan is not working.  In fact, I think the virus is out for revenge.  I have been coughing so hard and so long for the past ten days that I somehow managed to pull the muscles on the left side of my neck.  Is that even possible?!

Yes, apparently, it is.  Grar.  I'm taking this virus to the doctor next week if it doesn't clear up.  It's already cost me a solo (the last one I might get to do in the little cathedral we sing at every semester), and I don't even know if I'll be able to do the concert, since the beauty of the stone and stained glass doesn't match the ugly and distracting sound of me coughing with such hopeless abandon every three minutes. 

I would like to at least make it through the concert.  They need my A flat in the lovely chant piece "we're" doing . . .


On the upside, one of the jerk bosses at work feels pretty sorry for me in my helpless misery, so he's been a lot less annoying lately.  See, there is indeed a silver lining.

Italian music, Italians, Latin

We had a mini-concert tonight, three pieces in a music department showcase they do every fall for Parents' Weekend on campus.  Our first song was in Italian, and I found myself thinking of a friend who is of Italian descent and has the ability to make any foreign language sound like Italian.  It's hilarious.  My favorite was his impression of The Count from Sesame Street, sounding like an Italian trying to sound (like an American trying to sound) Transylvanian or something.  You probably had to be there.  He makes incredible Italian food, too, and cheesecake, which is not exactly Italian, or is it?  Also, his wife makes the best chocolate bread pudding in the history of ever.

The concert went pretty darn well.  Wow.  That second song (in Latin) went much better than I thought it would from our rehearsals, but I think in a month when we have our Christmas concert, it could actually be breathtaking, like people in the audience might stop breathing during the pianissimo parts because they want to make sure they hear it all.  Then again, I think the chamber music concert hall we performed it in today may have actually been the best acoustic for it, so we'll see how it fares in the muddled reverb of a cathedral.  There weren't a ton of people at the concert, but those who were there will have a lovely memory of "Lux Aurumque".  Pretty. 

Excuse me while my eyes roll back in my head as I remember how lovely it was to be a part of that sound . . .


Ever had any fun with accents/other languages?

About singing

"Singing well is one of the greatest pleasures a human being can experience."

- my choir director

Concert Prep

Concert tomorrow morning!  Yay!  We sing this concert in the little cathedral where we perform our Christmas concert in early December.  It has a really lovely acoustic that's perfect for the lighter voices of our young choir. 

I'm thinking about Christmas small group music, so I'm wondering, what are your favorite obscure Christmas carols that would sound stunning a cappella filling a little cathedral?